With a great effort Stafford controlled himself.  Krool must be got rid of at once, must be sent back to the prisoners’ quarters and kept there.  He must not see Byng now.  In a few more hours the army would move on, leaving the prisoners behind, and Rudyard would presently move on with the army.  This was Byng’s last day at Brinkwort’s Farm, to which he himself had come to-day lest Rudyard should take note of his neglect, and their fellow-officers should remark that the old friendship had grown cold, and perhaps begin to guess at the reason why.

“You say the Baas sent for you?” he asked presently.

“Yes.”

“To sjambok you again?”

Krool made a gesture of contempt.  “I save the Baas at Hetmeyer’s Kopje.  I kill Piet Graaf to do it.”

There was a look of assurance in the eyes of the mongrel, which sent a wave of coldness through Stafford’s veins and gave him fresh anxiety.

He was in despair.  He knew Byng’s great, generous nature, and he dreaded the inconsistency which such men show—­forgiving and forgetting when the iron penalty should continue and the chains of punishment remain.

He determined to know the worst.  “Traitor all round!” he said presently with contempt.  “You saved the Baas by killing Piet Graaf—­have you told the Baas that?  Has any one told the Baas that?  The sjambok is the Baas’ cure for the traitor, and sometimes it kills to cure.  Do you think that the Baas would want his life through the killing of Piet Graaf by his friend Krool, the slim one from the slime?”

As a sudden tempest twists and bends a tree, contorts it, bows its branches to the dust, transforms it from a thing of beauty to a hag of Walpurgis, so Stafford’s words transformed Krool.  A passion of rage possessed him.  He looked like one of the creatures that waited on Wotan in the nether places.  He essayed to speak, but at first could not.  His body bent forward, and his fingers spread out in a spasm of hatred, then clinched with the stroke of a hammer on his knees, and again opened and shut in a gesture of loathsome cruelty.

At length he spoke, and Stafford listened intently, for now Caliban was off his guard, and he knew the worst that was meant.

“Ah, you speak of traitor—­you!  The sjambok for the traitor, eh?  The sjambok—­fifty strokes, a hunderd strokes—­a t’ousand!  Krool—­Krool is a traitor, and the sjambok for him.  What did he do?  What did Krool do?  He help Oom Paul against the Rooinek—­against the Philistine.  He help the chosen against the children of Hell.

“What did Krool do?  He tell Oom Paul how the thieves would to come in the night to sold him like sheep to a butcher, how the t’ousand wolves would swarm upon the sheepfold, and there would be no homes for the voortrekker and his vrouw, how the Outlander would sit on our stoeps and pick the peaches from our gardens.  And he tell him other things good for him to hear.”